Urban affairs

October 23, 2009

Massachusetts was shut out of the American Planning Association's annual "Great Places" list, released earlier this month. But city and town planners don't have to go far to find inspiration, as three New England spots were honored: Front Street, in Bath, Maine; New Haven Green; and Central Square in Keene, New Hampshire.

Lest the above examples suggest that the APA has quaint, small-town taste, I should point out that other winners this year include Chicago's Lincoln Park and New Orleans's Faubourg Marigny neighborhood.

Last year, two Massachusetts sites were on the list. Downtown Salem was named a Great Neighborhood (its "eccentric street grid, and profusion of archetypal old houses belie a humming, mixed-use district"), and Boston's Washington Street grabbed a Great Street designation (for its South End section, not for embarrassingly empty Downtown Crossing).

In 2007, the first year of the awards, Northampton's Main Street was the only Bay State recipient.

March 05, 2009

I guess you work with the downtown development that you have, not the downtown development that you wish you had. From today's Boston Globe:

Mayor Thomas M. Menino strolled part of the Downtown Crossing district of Boston yesterday, shaking hands with enthusiastic shop owners and celebrating the grand opening of a burrito shop....

"It's important to have people walking there," Menino said after cutting the ribbon at Boloco, a chain restaurant that has large windows that open onto Province Street.

The next time you walk past the section of Washington Street that used to be Filene's, remind yourself: No, this isn't Berlin circa 1945, for I'm within walking distance of a Cajun burrito with organic tofu!

November 20, 2008

Harvard Square's Out of Town News is slated to close after 53 years, making the neighborhood a little less literary. (Such bookstores as Wordsworth and Reading International are long gone.) Fortunately, the space won't be empty for long, according to Mike Mennonno:

KFC/Taco Bell have expressed an interest in the property!

The restaurant chain could lend some much-needed permanence to the ever-changing square, and put something truly useful back at this crossroads of the commerce and culture in Cambridge. I mean, print media is so last millennium, but who doesn't like fried chicken and tacos — UNDER ONE ROOF! It's practically recession-proof!

I sense sarcasm, as well as complete fabrication.

But what else can we hope for, other than a more upscale eatery? Just about every other form of business that can serve as an urban meeting place -- bookstores, music stores, movie theaters, and even home furnishing stores -- is on the ropes. "Browseries," where one can kill time without necessarily buying something, are becoming extinct. Eating and drinking seem to be the only activity that can sustain a streetside business these days. (Matt Yglesias was properly astonished by a zoning law in a commercial district of Washington, D.C., limiting restaurants to 25 percent of total sidewalk frontage. Boston's North End and South End would cease to exist under such a law.)

October 27, 2008

The Washington Post's Alec MacGillis has a nice piece on Barack Obama as having the strongest "city pedigree" of any presidential nominee since Al Smith in 1928. (MacGillis dismisses Michael Dukakis as a resident of "genteel Brookline" -- and it's true that, despite having its most famous resident take the subway to Beacon Hill when he was governor, Brookline insists on calling itself a "town." And he writes that John F. Kennedy and John F. Kerry fit Hyannisport and Nantucket better than they did Boston.)

But the gist of his piece is that Obama represents the rise of the metropolitan mindset rather than the revival of urban politics:

With his organizer background, he could have cast himself as a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations. Instead, he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types -- promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings. Cities, he argues, are now melded to their suburbs, and, taken as a whole, America's metro areas are the "backbone of regional growth," as he put it in a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "Washington remains trapped in an earlier era," he said, "wedded to an outdated 'urban' agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas, an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both."

As a matter of policy, this approach makes sense. As politics, it's even more sensible. The reason the Democratic Party remains competitive (and, this year, ascendent) in national politics is that it has become the Metropolitan Party even as its inner-city base has lost voting strength. This happened a long time ago in Massachusetts, when older suburbs aligned themselves with Boston to elect Democrats such as Dukakis (and, more recently, Gov. Deval Patrick). It's now happening in places such as Virginia, whose slice of metropolitan Washington, DC, seems likely to deliver the state to Obama next week.

March 24, 2008

Corby Kummer writes about Nuestras Raices, a community gardening program in the "Gateway City" of Holyoke, in the new issue of the Atlantic magazine. Read Kummer's piece, but also check out Melissa DaPonte Katz's "A Tale of Two Valleys," from the Fall 2006 issue of CommonWealth, in which she writes about Nuestras Raices and the larger issues of poverty and downtown redevelopment in Holyoke, one of the poorest communities in the state and the most heavily Puerto Rican city on the US mainland. (Another CommonWealth, contributor, B.J. Roche, wrote a piece on Nuestras Raices that accompanied Katz's story.) As Katz wrote:

Over time, Holyoke has become the beneficiary of a plethora of publicly funded health and human services, along with grants to combat its problems with gangs, teen pregnancy, and school dropouts. But local officials are now looking for ways to use public dollars to help the city do more than scrape by. Their goal is to salvage something that was left behind by the industrialists who helped develop the city more than 150 years ago: a canal system originally built to power paper and textile mills by harnessing energy from the Connecticut River.

Kummer's focus is not so much the industrial past but the agricultural future at a 30-acre farm along the riverbank:

Ortiz knows how to cook the vegetables he grows (he told me how he fries eggplant): his father is a professional cook, and “half my friends,” he says, are studying to be chefs at Dean Technical. “Some people think gardening is for girls only,” he told me, “and you should get a real job, like working at a factory.” But “seeing someone popular do it makes it easier.”

So does seeing men grow vegetables during the day and use the gardens as social clubs at night. On summer weekends, there are music festivals on a bandstand built from foraged wood. The pig roasts, tended by men, are so popular that the farm will spin off a lechonera, the name for restaurants and roadside stands all over Puerto Rico that sell spit-roasted pig and traditional side dishes.

November 08, 2007

Edward Glaeser has a good rundown, from a government skeptic's perspective, on the urban train wreck called Buffalo (well, Boston could have suffered the same fate if not for Harvard and MIT) in the latest issue of City Journal. I was struck by one passage:

...declining areas also become magnets for poor people, attracted by cheap housing. This is exactly what happened to Buffalo, whose median home value is just $61,000, far below the state average of $260,000. More than 10 percent of Buffalo’s residents in 2000, it’s worth noting, had moved there since 1995. The influx of the poor reinforces a city’s downward spiral, since it drives up public expenditures while doing little to expand the local tax base.

It's easy to get a mental picture of a city with declining population (not only Buffalo, but St. Louis, Detroit, and Boston from the 1950s through the 1970s) that emphasizes people packing up and leaving, but Glaeser notes that even failing cities attract a lot of new residents. Indeed, the Census Bureau recorded 65,923 people moving into Buffalo's Erie County between 1995 and 2000 (the last years available) even as 107,038 people moved out. That's only 500 fewer people than the number who moved into Plymouth County, Massachusetts (considered a prosperous, growing suburban area), during the same period. I'm not familiar enough with Glaeser's data to confirm that Buffalo's newcomers are only making the city poorer, but it's daunting to think of a major city hit with a double whammy: the people who move out and the people who move in.

November 06, 2007

Exactly one year before the presidential election, the Washington-based Brookings Institution this morning launched "Blueprint for American Prosperity," a "multi-year initiative to promote an economic agenda for the nation that builds on the assets—and centrality—of America’s metropolitan areas." MassINC will serve as a partner in this effort to identify key federal roles in everything from transportation policy to higher education programs that can help build a strong and diverse middle class. This map lets you click on a state to view a profile of its major metropolitan areas.

October 11, 2007

The New York Times reports on the case of a pedestrian arrested for -- well, not being enough of a pedestrian:

According to court documents, a man named Matthew Jones was charged with disorderly conduct ... in June 2004. According to court papers, a police officer "observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around at the above location, to wit a public sidewalk, not moving, and that as a result of defendant’s behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants."

The short news item is accompanied by dozens of online complaints about slow walkers, cellphone abusers, and people who get in the way on escalators.

This is a real conundrum for those of us who live or work in Boston, especially along the Freedom Trail. Yes, we value liberty and are not fond of laws that restrict personal movement or the lack thereof. But it would make our commutes shorter if tourists weren't allowed to stop and gawk on our narrow sidewalks...

October 09, 2007

Entrepreneur.com has an interesting list of the 10 Businesses Facing Extinction in 10 Years. No surprise that newspapers and pay phones are on there, but a few may be worrisome to those trying to revive urban business districts: Used bookstores, record stores, and (arguably) gay bars. These kinds of businesses, with low start-up costs and little need for advertising, once thrived in neighborhoods that weren't quite affluent enough to attract national chains like The Gap or Urban Outfitters. I'm thinking in particular of Somerville's Davis Square, considered a shining example of a vibrant neighborhood on a public-transit line with an economy based almost entirely on independent businesses. One of them is a used bookstore (McIntyre and Moore), and not too long ago there were two used record stores, all of them conducive to browsing. Can we nurture other Davis Squares without these kinds of establishments?